5 SaaS Companies in Malaysia and How They Make Money Online

SaaS businesses have become more and more popular in Malaysia. One of the main reasons is because rather than get paid once for selling a standalone software, with cloud-based SaaS, companies can now charge a monthly fee, giving them recurring revenues as long as they can keep their customers.

It’s not only the businesses that benefit though. SaaS business models provide a lot of advantages for its customers as well. Unlike standalone software which needs to be updated manually, SaaS software can be constantly updated. This means their customers get their software updated over the internet every time the company decides to do so.

While there are many advantages of using SaaS, SaaS businesses also come with a lot of challenges. One of the biggest challenges is to gain enough customers to keep the business as well as having enough resources to expand your operations to accommodate more and more customers.

Nonetheless, if you are successful, SaaS businesses can be one of the most valued businesses in the world. Popular SaaS businesses that have achieved high, billion-dollar valuations include Salesforce ($88bil valuation) and DropBox ($6.6 – 8.5bil valuation).

If you have ever thought about starting a SaaS business in Malaysia, I have compiled 10 of the most successful SaaS companies in Malaysia to give you an insight on:

the services they provide,

how they make money

and how successful they have been in their space

With this, I hope that you will gain a better understanding of whether you should go into the SaaS space and if you decide to do so, how to begin.

Let’s begin with…

Piktochart

No SaaS list in Malaysia is ever complete without the mention of Piktochart. Piktochart is a SaaS that started in 2011 as a tool to help people create infographics easily. Today, Piktochart has expanded to become a tool not only to create infographics but presentations, reports, flyers, posters and more.

Users can easily pick from a large library of icons, images, illustrations as well as use font and other design tools to create professional looking graphics without having to learn difficult technical design skills.

Although Piktochart started in Penang, its customers are based all over the world. As of 2016, Piktochart has over 7.5million registered users.

This is a pretty insightful article about how Piktochart began. It discusses the early days of coming up with an MVP, validating the idea, polishing the product and then getting traction through various marketing efforts:

StoreHub

StoreHub is a cloud-based retail iPad POS system for small businesses of which I am also a customer of. One of StoreHub’s (as well as any iPad POS System) features is that the merchant will be able to access sales information in real time anywhere in the world.

Based in Kuala Lumpur, StoreHub powers almost 4,000 stores all over the world.

Niagawan

Niagawan is an accounting and invoice generation software for small businesses. Having a Malay language interface and highly affordable pricing plans (starting at RM99 a year) are some of the biggest pull factors for customers of Niagawan.

Although Niagawan’s features are basic, they are sufficient for most small business owners, even ones which have to deal with GST. Niagawan’s main function is in helping small business save costs in keeping their accounts tidy for themselves as well as their yearly audits.

Billplz

Billplz is a pay per use payment gateway. No startup costs and low pay-per-use fees make Billplz a popular payment gateway choice for startups and small businesses alike who mainly accept FPX (bank transfer) payments in RM.

Main marketing strategy: Referrals (more than 50% of Billplz traffic come from referrals from other sites)

Pricing methods: RM1.50 per transaction

Funds raised: Unknown

PM Bot

PM Bot is a Facebook chatbot that solves the problem of answering to all the ‘pm’ comments for small businesses that is pretty common in Malaysia. With PM Bot, you can send pre-written replies to anyone who writes ‘pm’ in the comments section of your Facebook page.

This is a huge timesaver for anyone who relies heavily on their Facebook page to engage with their customers.